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The Recreations of A Country Parson

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THE RECREATIONS OF A COUNTRY PARSON.

SECOND SERIES.

A. K. H. BOYD.

BOSTON:

1862.






CONTENTS.





CHAPTER I. CONCERNING THE PARSON'S CHOICE

CHAPTER II. CONCERNING DISAPPOINTMENT AND SUCCESS

CHAPTER III. CONCERNING SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS

CHAPTER IV. CONCERNING CHURCHYARDS

CHAPTER V. CONCERNING SUMMER DAYS

CHAPTER VI. CONCERNING SCREWS

CHAPTER VII. CONCERNING SOLITARY DAYS

CHAPTER VIII. CONCERNING GLASGOW DOWN THE WATER

CHAPTER IX. CONCERNING MAN AND HIS DWELLING-PLACE

CHAPTER X. LIFE AT THE WATER-CURE

CHAPTER XI. CONCERNING FRIENDS IN COUNCIL

CHAPTER XII. CONCERNING THE PULPIT IN SCOTLAND

CHAPTER XIII. CONCERNING FUTURE TEARS

CHAPTER XIV. CONCLUSION





CHAPTER I.

CONCERNING THE PARSON'S CHOICE BETWEEN TOWN AND COUNTRY.




One very happy circumstance in a clergyman's lot, is that he is
saved from painful perplexity as regards his choice of the scene
in which he is to spend his days and years. I am sorry for the
man who returns from Australia with a large fortune; and with no
further end in life than to settle down somewhere and enjoy it.
For in most cases he has no special tie to any particular place;
and he must feel very much perplexed where to go. Should any person
who may read this page cherish the purpose of leaving me a hundred
thousand pounds to invest in a pretty little estate, I beg that
he will at once abandon such a design. He would be doing me no
kindness. I should be entirely bewildered in trying to make up my
mind where I should purchase the property. I should be rent asunder
by conflicting visions of rich English landscape, and heathery Scottish
hills: of seaside breezes, and inland meadows: of horse-chestnut
avenues, and dark stern pine-woods. And after the estate had been
bought, I should always be looking back and thinking I might have
done better. So, on the whole, I would prefer that my reader should
himself buy the estate, and bequeath it to me: and then I could
soon persuade myself that it was the prettiest estate and the
pleasantest neighbourhood in Britain.

Now, as a general rule, the Great Disposer says to the parson, Here
is your home, here lies your work through life: go and reconcile
your mind to it, and do your best in it. No doubt there are men in
the Church whose genius, popularity, influence, or luck is such,
that they have a bewildering variety of livings pressed upon them:
but it is not so with ordinary folk; and certainly it was not so
with me. I went where Providence bade me go, which was not where
I had wished to go, and not where I had thought to go. Many who
know me through the pages which make this and a preceding volume,
have said, written, and printed, that I was specially cut out for
a country parson, and specially adapted to relish a quiet country
life. Not more, believe me, reader, than yourself. It is in every
man who sets himself to it to attain the self-same characteristics.
It is quite true I have these now: but, a few years since, never
was mortal less like them. No cockney set down near Sydney Smith
at Foston-le-Clay: no fish, suddenly withdrawn from its native
stream: could feel more strange and cheerless than did I when I
went to my beautiful country parish, where I have spent such happy
days, and which I have come to love so much.

I have said that the parson is for the most part saved the labour
of determining where he shall pitch his tent: his place and his
path in life are marked out for him. But he has his own special
perplexity and labour: quite different from those of the man to
whom the hundred thousand pounds to invest in land are bequeathed:
still, as some perhaps would think, no less hard. His work is to
reconcile his mind to the place where God has set him. Every mortal
must, in many respects, face one of these two trials. There is all
the world before you, where to choose; and then the struggle to
make a decided choice with which you shall on reflection remain
entirely satisfied. Or there is no choice at all: the Hand above
gives you your place and your work; and then there is the struggle
heartily and cheerfully to acquiesce in the decree as to which you
were not consulted.

And this is not always an easy thing; though I am sure that the
man who honestly and Christianly tries to do it, will never fail to
succeed at last. How curiously people are set down in the Church;
and indeed in all other callings whatsoever! You find men in the
last places they would have chosen; in the last places for which
you would say they are suited. You pass a pretty country church,
with its parsonage hard-by embosomed in trees and bright with
roses. Perhaps the parson of that church had set his heart on an
entirely different kind of charge: perhaps he is a disappointed
man, eager to get away, and (the very worst possible policy) trying
for every vacancy of which he can hear. You think, as you pass by,
and sit down on the churchyard wall, how happy you could be in so
quiet and sweet a spot: well, if you are willing to do a thing,
it is pleasant: but if you are struggling with a chain you cannot
break, it is miserable. The pleasantest thing becomes painful,
if it is felt as a restraint. What can be cosier than the warm
environment of sheet and blanket which encircles you in your snug
bed? Yet if you awake during the night at some alarm of peril, and
by a sudden effort try at once to shake yourself clear of these
trammels, you will, for the half-minute before you succeed, feel
that soft restraint as irksome as iron fetters. 'Let your will lead
whither necessity would drive,' said Locke, 'and you will always
preserve your liberty.' No doubt, it is wise advice; but how to do
all that?

Well, it can be done: but it costs an effort. Great part of the
work of the civilized and educated man consists of that which the
savage, and even the uneducated man, would not regard as work at
all. The things which cost the greatest effort may be done, perhaps,
as you sit in an easy chair with your eyes shut. And such an effort
is that of making up our mind to many things, both in our own lot,
and in the lot of others. I mean not merely the intellectual effort
to look at the success of other men and our own failure in such a
way as that we shall be intellectually convinced that, we have no
right to complain of either: I do not mean merely the labour to
put things in the right point of view: but the moral effort to look
fairly at the facts not in any way disguised,--not tricked out by
some skilful art of putting things;--and yet to repress all wrong
feeling;--all fretfulness, envy, jealousy, dislike, hatred. I do
not mean, to persuade ourselves that the grapes are sour; but (far
nobler surely) to be well aware that they are sweet, and yet be
content that another should have them and not we. I mean the labour,
when you have run in a race and been beaten, to resign your mind
to the fact that you have been beaten, and to bear a kind feeling
towards the man who beat you. And this is labour, and hard labour;
though very different from that physical exertion which the uncivilized
man would understand by the word. Every one can understand that to
carry a heavy portmanteau a mile is work. Not every one remembers
that the owner of the portmanteau, as he walks on carrying nothing
weightier than an umbrella, may be going through exertion much
harder than that of the porter. Probably St. Paul never spent
days of harder work in all his life, than the days he spent lying
blind at Damascus, struggling to get free from the prejudices and
convictions of all his past years, and resolving--on the course he
would pursue in the years to come.

I know that in all professions and occupations to which men
can devote themselves, there is such a thing as com petition: and
wherever there is competition, there will be the temptation to envy,
jealousy, and detraction, as regards a man's competitors: and so
there will be the need of that labour and exertion which lie in
resolutely trampling that temptation down. You are quite certain,
rny friend, as you go on through life, to have to make up your
mind to failure and disappointment on your own part, and to seeing
other men preferred before you. When these tilings come, there
are two ways of meeting them. One is, to hate and vilify those who
surpass you, either in merit or in success: to detract from their
merit and under-rate their success: or, if you must admit some
merit, to bestow upon it very faint praise. Now, all this is natural
enough; but assuredly it is neither a right nor a happy course to
follow. The other and better way is, to fight these tendencies to
the death: to struggle against them, to pray against them: to resign
yourself to God's good will: to admire and love the man who beats
you. This course is the right one, and the happy one. I believe the
greatest blessing God can send a man, is disappointment, rightly
met and used. There is no more ennobling discipline: there is no
discipline that results in a happier or kindlier temper of mind.
And in honestly fighting against the evil impulses which have been
mentioned, you will assuredly get help and strength to vanquish
them. I have seen the plain features look beautiful, when man or
woman was faithfully by God's grace resisting wrong feelings and
tendencies, such as these. It is a noble end to attain, and it
is well worth all the labour it costs, to resolutely be resigned,
cheerful, and kind, when you feel a strong inclination to be
discontented, moody, and bitter of heart. Well said a very wise
mortal, 'Better is he that ruleth his spirit, than he that taketh
a city.' And that ruling of the spirit which is needful to rightly
meet disappointment, brings out the best and noblest qualities that
can be found in man.

Sometimes, indeed, even in the parson's quiet life, he may know
something of the first perplexity of which we have been thinking:
the perplexity of the man who is struggling to make up his mind
where he is to settle down for the remainder of life. And it is
not long since such a perplexity came my way. For I had reached a
spot in my onward path at which I must make a decided choice. I must
go either to the right or the left: for, as Goldsmith has remarked
with great force, when the road you are pursuing parts into several
roads, you must be careful to follow only one. And I had to decide
between country and town. I had to resolve whether I was to remain
in that quiet cure of souls about which I formerly told you; or go
into the hard work and hurry of a large parish in a certain great
city.

I had been for more than five years in that sweet country place: it
seemed a very long time as the days passed over. Even slow-growing
ivy grew feet longer in that time, and climbing roses covered yards
and yards of wall. And for very many months I thought that here I
was to live and die, and never dreamt of change. Not indeed that
my tastes were always such. At the beginning of that term of years,
when I went down each Sunday morning to preach in the plain little
church to a handful of quiet rustic people, I used to think of
a grand edifice where once upon a time, at my first start in my
profession, I had preached each afternoon for many months to a very
large congregation of educated folk; and I used to wonder whether
my old friends remembered and missed me. Once there was to me
a fascination about that grand church, and all connected with it:
now it is to me no more than it is to every one else, and I pass
near it almost every day and hardly look at it. Other men have
taken my old place in it, and had the like feelings, and got over
them. Several of these men I never saw: how much I should like to
shake each man's hand! But all these fancies were long, long ago:
I was pleased to be a country parson, and to make the best of it.
Friends, who have held like stations in life, have you not felt,
now and then, a little waking up of old ideas and aspirations? All
this, you thought, was not what you once had wished, and pictured
to yourself. You vainly fancied, in your student days, that you
might reach a more eminent place and greater usefulness. I know,
indeed, that even such as have gone very unwillingly to a little
remote country parish, have come most heartily to enjoy its peaceful
life: have grown fond of that, as they never thought to do. I do
not mean that you need affectedly talk, after a few months there,
as if you had lived in the country all your life, and as if your
thoughts had from childhood run upon horses, turnips, and corn. But
in sober earnest, as weeks pass over, you gain a great interest in
little country cares; and you discover that you may be abundantly
useful, and abundantly laborious, amid a small and simple population.

Yet sometimes, my clever friend, I know you sit down on a green
bank, under the trees, and look at your little church. You think,
of your companions and competitors in College days, filling
distinguished places in life: and, more particularly, of this and
that friend in your own calling, who preaches to as many people on
one Sunday as you do in half a year. Fine fellows they were: and
though you seldom meet now, you are sure they are faithful, laborious,
able, and devoted ministers: God bless them all! You wonder how
they can do so much work; and especially how they have confidence
to preach to so large and intelligent congregations. For a certain
timidity, and distrust of his own powers, grows upon the country
parson. He is reaching the juster estimate of himself, indeed: yet
there is something not desirable in the nervous dislike to preach
in large churches and to cultivated people which is sure to come.
And little things worry him, which would not worry a mind kept more
upon the stretch. It is possible enough that among the Cumberland
hills, or in curacies like Sydney Smith's on Salisbury Plain, or
wandering sadly by the shore of Shetland fiords, there may be men
who had in them the makings of eminent preachers; but whose powers
have never been called out, and are rusting sadly away: and in whom
many petty cares are developing a pettiness of nature.

I have observed that in those advertisements which occasionally appear
in certain newspapers, offering for sale the next presentation to
some living in the Church, the advertiser, after pointing out the
various advantages of the situation, frequently sums up by stating
that the population of the parish is very small, and so the
clergyman's duty very light. I always read such a statement with
great displeasure. For it seems to imply, that a clergyman's great
object is, to enjoy his benefice and do as little duty as possible
in return for it. I suppose it need not be proved, that if such
were truly the great object of any parson, he has no business to
be in the Church at all. Failing health, or powers overdriven, may
sometimes make even the parson whose heart is in his work desire a
charge whose duty and responsibility are comparatively small: but
I firmly believe that in the case of the great majority of clergymen,
it is the interest and delight they feel in their work, and not
its worldly emolument, that mainly attach them to their sacred
profession: and thus that the more work they have to do (provided
their strength be equal to it), the more desirable and interesting
they hold their charge to be. And I believe that the earnest pastor,
settled in some light and pleasant country charge, will oftentimes,
even amid his simple enjoyment of that pleasant life, think that
perhaps he would be more in the path of duty, if, while the best
years of his life are passing on, he were placed where he might
serve his Master in a larger sphere.

And thinking now and then in this fashion, I was all of a sudden
asked to undertake a charge such as would once have been my very
ideal: and in that noble city where my work began, and so which
has always been very dear. But I felt that everything was changed.
Before these years of growing experience, I dare say I should not
have feared to set myself even to work as hard; but now I doubted
greatly whether I should prove equal to it. That time in the country
had made me sadly lose confidence. And I thought it would be very
painful and discouraging to go to preach to a large congregation,
and to see it Sunday by Sunday growing less, as people got discontented
and dropped away.

But happily, those on whom I leant for guidance and advice, were
more hopeful than myself; and so I came away from my beautiful
country parish. You know, my friends, who have passed through the
like, the sorrow to look for the last time at each kind homely
face: the sorrow to turn away from the little church where you have
often preached to very small congregations: the sorrow to leave
each tree you have planted, and the evergreens whose growth you
have watched, year by year. Soon, you are in all the worry of what
in Scotland we call a flitting: the house and all its belongings
are turned upside down. The kindness of the people comes out with
tenfold strength when they know how soon you are to part. And some,
to whom you had tried to do little favours, and who had somewhat
disappointed you by the slight sense of them they had shown, now
testify by their tears a hearty regard which you never can forget.

The Sunday comes when you enter your old pulpit for the last time.
You had prepared your sermon in a room from which the carpet had
been removed, and amid a general confusion and noise of packing.
The church is crowded in a fashion never seen before. You go through
the service, I think, with a sense of being somewhat stunned and
bewildered. And in the closing sentences of your sermon, you say
little of yourself; but in a few words, very hard to speak, you
thank your old friends for their kindness to you through the years
you have passed together; and you give them your parting advice, in
some sentence which seems to contain the essence of all you meant
to teach in all these Sundays; and you say farewell, farewell.

You are happy, indeed, if after all, though quitting your country
parsonage, and turning over a new leaf in life, you have not to make
a change so entire as that from country to town generally is: if,
like me, you live in the most beautiful city in Britain: a city
where country and town are blended together: where there are green
gardens, fields, and trees: shady places into which you may turn
from the glaring streets, into verdure as cool and quiet as ever,
and where your little children can roll upon the grass, and string
daisies as of old; streets, from every opening in which you look
out upon blue hills and blue sea. No doubt, the work is very hard,
and very constant; and each Sunday is a very exciting and exhausting
day. You will understand, my friend, when you go to such a charge,
what honour is due to those venerable men who have faithfully and
efficiently done the duty of the like for thirty or forty years.
You will look at them with much interest: you will receive their
kindly counsel with great respect. You will feel it somewhat trying
and nervous work to ascend your pulpit; and to address men and women
who in mental cultivation, and in things much more important, are
more than equal to yourself. And as you walk down; always alone,
to church each Sunday morning, you will very earnestly apply for
strength and wisdom beyond your own, in a certain Quarter where
they will never be sought in vain. Yet you will delight in all your
duty: and you will thank God you feel that were your work in life
to choose again, you would give yourself to the noblest task that
can be undertaken by mortal, with a resolute purpose firmer a
thousand times than even the enthusiastic preference of your early
youth. The attention and sympathy with which your congregation
will listen to your sermons, will be a constant encouragement and
stimulus; and you will find friends so dear and true, that yon.
will hope never to part from them while life remains. In such a
life, indeed, these Essays, which never would have been begun had
my duty been always such, must be written in little snatches of
time: and perhaps a sharp critic could tell, from internal evidence,
which of them have been written in the country and which in the
town. I look up from the table at which I write: and the roses,
honeysuckle, and the fuchsias, of a year since, are far away:
through the window I discover lofty walls, whose colour inclines
to black. Yet I have not regretted the day, and I do not believe
I ever will regret the day, when I ceased to be a Country Parson.





CHAPTER II.

CONCERNING DISAPPOINTMENT AND SUCCESS.




Russet woods of Autumn, here you are once more! I saw you, golden
and brown, in the afternoon sunshine to-day. Crisp leaves were
falling, as I went along the foot-path through the woods: crisp
leaves lie upon the green graves in the churchyard, fallen from the
ashes: and on the shrubbery walks, crisp leaves from the beeches,
accumulated where the grass bounds the gravel, make a warm edging,
irregular, but pleasant to see. It is not that one is 'tired of
summer:' but there is something soothing and pleasing about the
autumn days. There is a great clearness of the atmosphere sometimes;
sometimes a subdued, gray light is diffused everywhere. In the
country, there is often, on these afternoons, a remarkable stillness
in the air, amid which you can hear a withering leaf rustling down.
I will not think that the time of bare branches and brown grass
is so very near as yet; Nature is indeed decaying, but now we have
decay only in its beautiful stage, wherein it is pensive, but not
sad. It is but early in October; and we, who live in the country all
through the winter, please ourselves with the belief that October
is one of the finest months of the year, and that we have many
warm, bright, still days yet before us. Of course we know we are
practising upon ourselves a cheerful, transparent delusion; even
as the man of forty-eight often declares that about forty-eight
or fifty is the prime of life. I like to remember that Mrs. Hemans
was describing October, when she began her beautiful poem on The
Battle of Morgarlen, by saying that, 'The wine-month shone in its
golden prime:' and I think that in these words the picture presented
to the mind of an untravelled Briton, is not the red grapes hanging in
blushing profusion, but rather the brown, and crimson, and golden
woods, in the warm October sunshine. So, you russet woods of autumn,
you are welcome once more; welcome with all your peculiar beauty,
so gently enjoyable by all men and women who have not used up life;
and with all your lessons, so unobtrusive, so touching, that have
come home to the heart of human generations for many thousands
of years. Yesterday was Sunday; and I was preaching to my simple
rustics an autumn sermon from the text We all do fade as a leaf.
As I read out the text, through a half-opened window near me, two
large withered oak-leaves silently floated into the little church
in the view of all the congregation. I could not but pause for a
minute till they should preach their sermon before I began mine.
How simply, how unaffectedly, with what natural pathos they seemed
to tell their story! It seemed as if they said, Ah you human beings,
something besides us is fading; here we are, the things like which
you fade!

And now, upon this evening, a little sobered by the thought that
this is the fourth October which has seen this hand writing that
which shall attain the authority of print, I sit down to begin an
essay which is to be written leisurely as recreation and not as
work. I need not finish this essay, unless I choose, for six weeks
to come: so I have plenty of time, and I shall never have to write
under pressure. That is pleasant. And I write under another feeling,
more pleasing and encouraging still. I think that in these lines
I am addressing many unknown friends, who, though knowing nothing
more of me than they can learn from pages which I have written,
have come gradually not to think of me as a stranger. I wish here
to offer my thanks to many whose letters, though they were writing
only to a shadow, have spoken in so kindly a fashion of the writer's
slight productions, that they have given me much enjoyment in the
reading, and much encouragement to go on. To all my correspondents,
whether named or nameless, I now, in a moral sense, extend a friendly
hand. As to the question sometimes put, who the writer is, that
is of no consequence. But as to what he is, I think, intelligent
readers of his essays, you will gradually and easily see that.

It is a great thing to write leisurely, and with a general feeling
of kindliness and satisfaction with everybody; but there is a
further reason why one should set to work at once. I feel I must
write now, before my subject loses its interest; and before the
multitude of thoughts, such as they are, which have been clustering
round it since it presented itself this afternoon in that walk
through the woods, have faded away. It is an unhappy thing, but it
is the fact with many men, that if you do not seize your fancies
when they come to you, and preserve them upon the written page, you
lose them altogether. They go away, and never come back. A little
while ago I pulled out a drawer in this table whereon I write; and
I took out of it a sheet of paper, on which there are written down
various subjects for essays. Several are marked with a large cross;
these are the essays which are beyond the reach of fate: they are
written and printed. Several others have no cross; these are the
subjects of essays which are yet to be written. But upon four of
those subjects I look at once with interest and sorrow. I remember
when I wrote down their names, what a vast amount, as I fancied,
I had to say about them: and all experience failed to make me feel
that unless those thoughts were seized and chronicled at once,
they would go away and never come back again. How rich the subjects
appeared to me, I well remember! Now they are lifeless, stupid
things, of which it is impossible to make anything. Before, they
were like a hive, buzzing with millions of bees. Now they are like
the empty hive, when the life and stir and bustle of the bees are
gone. O friendly reader, what a loss it was to you, that the writer
did not at once sit down and sketch out his essays, Concerning Things
Slowly Learnt; and Concerning Growing Old! And two other subjects
of even greater value were, Concerning the Practical Effect of
Illogical Reasons, and An Estimate of the Practical Influence of
False Assertions. How the hive was buzzing when these titles were
written down: but now I really hardly remember anything of what
I meant to say, and what I remember appears wretched stuff. The
effervescence has gone from the champagne; it is flat and dead.
Still, it is possible that these subjects may recover their interest;
and the author hereby gives notice that he reserves the right of
producing an essay upon each of them. Let no one else infringe his
vested claims.

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